Assessment and Prediction of Effectiveness of Virtual Environments
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Lessons learned from Small Arms Simulation

The operational environment facing western militaries continues to increase in complexity. Greater likelihood of close quarters battle, more difficult friend-versus-foe discriminations, and wider presence of non-combatants on the battlefield increase marksmanship performance demands. Training, and training technologies, are one avenue for meeting the challenge. This chapter reviews the ways marksmanship simulators are evaluated, the results of evaluations on specific types of simulators, and looks the design process. In evaluating a simulator for marksmanship training, the transfer of training to live-fire performance is the principal criterion. Performance against existing military marksmanship standards is a valuable measure, but additional measures that make use of continuous metrics that are not confounded by factors unrelated to marksmanship can provide greater analytic power for the evaluation. Numerous studies attempting to predict live fire performance from performance in the simulator have found that the relationship between the two is present but weak. At the same time, performance on live fire tests following simulator training shows benefit of the simulator, but the effect is weak. This weak relationship appears to be due to the shortcomings in the training devices and the high degree of variability in marksmanship exhibited by trainees following live or simulated fire. Simulator design is likely sub-optimal. The extensive use of subject matter experts in the deve